Wednesday, September 23, 2009

LONG ISLAND GEESE

September 30, 2009

LONG ISLAND GEESE

By Ed Lowe


About 35 years ago, having caused, and then perhaps inflamed, a personnel problem in the upper echelons of Newsday, I was assigned to work as a general assignment reporter to the Nassau Desk, then held fast by Sylvan Fox, late of The New York Times, The State of Israel and the New York City Police Department.

We got along famously, Sylvan and I, because I thought I had escaped a bad situation with a legendary, big deal editor in the Suffolk office; and Fox thought (rightly) that all he had to do was give me crummy story ideas for four years, which was the length of my sentence, and otherwise not bother with me, unless I bothered with him.

I didn’t know about being sentenced, which still strikes me as strange. I mean, if you want to punish somebody, then let him know about it. Don’t keep it a secret.

Then-Newsday editor David Laventhol told me of the sentence years later, when he was moving up in Times Mirror Corporation, and I was a columnist.

I was poised to thank him, but he interrupted and told the story, and said, “If you tell anyone I said it, I’ll deny it, but you put in me in the position of having to choose between him (the editor) and you.”

I understand it a little better now, I guess, but it seems to me that he would only see a profit in it had I noticed it then.

Confused, I changed subjects and said something I thought amusing about an assignment to determine what individuals on Long Island were doing while the Presidency changed hands from Richard Nixon to Gerry Ford.

I was about to say, “What did the editors think people on Long Island were doing…?” when Laventhol interrupted and said, “You did a good job on that.”

I stopped.

“Know who’s idea that assignment was?”

I stayed stopped. As it turned out, wisely.

“Mine,” he said. “I told them, ‘Send Ed Lowe around to learn what Long Islanders were doing the moment Ford took over for Nixon.’ That was a hell of a job.”

I said, “Uh, thanks.”

Sylvan Fox gave me a host of made up, terrible assignments, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know they were made up or that they were terrible, like, “A View From Bellerose Terrace,” about the part of Bellerose that was in Nassau County, and, “A View From Lakeville,” which was the same thing, but on the North Shore.

He insisted that I take three days to do them, too. Three days for a half day’s work. I thought I was being rewarded.

The first day I hung around playing pool, drinking beer, and talking with a saloonful of people.
The second day I interviewed people, along with playing pool, and drinking beer. The morning of the third day, I wrote the piece, taking a second lunch hour with (the late) columnist John Pascal, before handing it in.

Meanwhile, Sylvan Fox moved to a bayfront condominium in Copiague, right near my house, right where I grew up, in Amityville, on Great South Bay (If Newsday editors bought property, it was up north, in Port Washington or in Huntington.).

So, when Fox called me, at home, I figured that Long Island was sinking, fast, or that someone at Newsday had told Fox if he wished to know anything about the South Shore, he should call Ed Lowe.

“You’ve got to come over here,” Fox said.

“What!? Why?”

“You’ve got to see what’s outside my kitchen door.”

I’d never been to an editor’s house.

He paraded me through the condominium and to the kitchen’s sliding glass doors. There, outside, was a Canada Goose, right there, prancing, shaking water off himself, struttin’ his stuff, as if he were in Toronto, Canada or Crisfield, Maryland.

“Holy smoke,” I said. “I’ve only seen photographs of them. They use the Eastern Flyway, but they never come near us. Gunners see them once in a while, but I’ve not. They never come here.”

Fox seemed satisfied at his discovery, too.

In the last 35 years, Canada geese have decidedly settled on Long Island. Many have given up migration and surrendered their passports. Their descendents have never seen Canada or the Chesapeake Bay.

They maybe move from the North to the South Shore for the difference in snowfall, but that is it.
They have taken root, have bought property, have had public meetings about when they will open sports fields and when they won’t; they have negotiated playing-times for golf courses, and have demanded signs for busy intersections.

Generations of people and ducks and dogs and birds have no recollection of Long Island without our, “Long Island,” geese.

And, oh, yeah, this year, the 35th anniversary of their arrival at the canals and creeks, the soccer fields and golf courses, the neighborhoods and busy highways, the guys who run the airports have finally noticed them, too. Highly paid guys.

“Look,” they exclaimed at the results of a study four months after a jet airliner pilot landed in the Hudson with shovelfuls of chewed-up Canada Geese sticking out of it’s engines, “Canada Geese. Where they did come from?”


Friday, September 18, 2009

MRS> YIZZLE

The Greek is one of a dozen people, maybe two dozen, who’ve been helping me out in more ways than I can count—in fact, probably in more ways than either he or I know—and I keep him supplied with oatmeal and raisin cookies in, uh, trade.

Cookies from BJ’s Wholesale Club, don’t you know, not just any oatmeal and raisin cookies.
Big cookies, with maybe a quarter-to-a-half box of raisins inside every one. Suz gets them for me.

Fresh, too. Fresh.

I make sure. I eat the cookies fast, so they’re replaced fast, so The Greek never, never suffers stale cookies.

All right, it’s not that much of a trade, but he likes them, and I like them, and that’ll have to do for a while, at least.

And stories, now that I can talk.

Yeeesssh! That a was tough year. The back half of it more than the front half. Because, if memory serves (and mind you, it does not. Does not serve at all. It has tricks to fool both itself, and later, you, just when your preparing to show off.), you know that you’re blithering the first time you blither. Maybe the second time, too. After that, well I don’t understand how it works.

At first, you notice something, let’s say, the TV remote, over on the table you’re about to learn you can’t reach, and you hear something, a gargoyality—I had to invent a word for that, because, I don’t know what made the sound—coming from you. It was an awful sound, sort of an old man’s howl, which you know wasn’t you, but, well, who was it, then?

Maybe that’s it, you’ve scared yourself. And now, whatever is going to come out of your mouth is going to be screened and reworked, so as to not frighten you into not speaking. However, nobody else is going to understand it when you are speaking, and you will not know that.

You likely will be repeating bolardoford, over and over, and not know it, because your system refuses to accept it. The people who love you will just smile, so that you will think that they are crazy.

Anyway, that stage is over.

So, here is a story I recently told the Greek, on the ocassion of the passage of Mrs.Yizzle, which my mother, with her incredibe memory and dedication to the obituary page, alerted me to.

One of my many crazy aunts lived in Lindenhust—636 North Erie Avenue—and when my mother got her license and my father let her use the car, she and I would drive from Amityville to visit her mother and her youngest sister.

Next door to her, when a next door got built, lived a woman whom I understood to be Mrs.Yizzle.

I would be reading, or putting on my coat to go outside, or taking it off, having come inside, and occassionly hear my Aunt Gerry, in the kitchen, mention Mrs. Yizzle, quote Mrs. Yizzle, even imitate Mrs. Yizzle’s high, funny-sounding voice. But I never saw Mrs. Yizzle, not once, during those trips.

One day, a warm day in late fall, I was out in front of my Aunt Gerry’s house, instead of out back, my normal haunt. Suddenly, Mrs. Yizzle’s front door opened, and there was activity inside that indicated a rare sighting of Mrs. Yizzle. I stopped whatever I was doing, and waited.

She appeared. It had to be her. She was calling in some kids to dinner.

“Hi, Mrs. Yizzle,” I said. Cheerfully.

She paid me no heed. Perhaps she hadn’t heard me.

“Hi, Mrs. Yizzle! Mrs. Yizzle, hi!”

No response. What was wrong?

“Hey, Misses Yizzle, over here. Hi. Hi, Misses Yizzle. Hello, Misses Yizzle…”

Suddenly, the red front door of my Aunt Gerry’s house blew open, followed by the aluminun storm door. Except for the abject horror in their expressions, I recognized the faces of the otherwise attractive mid-thirties women, one, my Aunt Gerry, and the other, my mother.
Both tackled me and lifted me backwards and up and over the stoop and into the living room and into the kitchen where they deposited, no, flung, me onto the floor.

They fell down beside me gasping and laughing, and then more laughing, and then more, and then, gasping desperately for air, trying to say something, but, interrupted by laughing.

Finally, one of them said, “Honey, Mrs. Yizzle! Mrs. Yizz…Her name is not Mrs. Yizzle!”

“Not Mrs. Yizzle!” the other one said. “Not Mrs. Yizzle!”

Followed by a return on both their parts to peels of laughter. “Not Mrs. Yizz…”

“It’s not? But you always call her Mrs.…”

Bedlam. Both of them, on the kitchen floor, laughing.

“No. It’s not her name. It’s just that…well, when she calls the kids…”

I think I was laughing, now, but I didn’t know why.

“…she tells them, ‘Come in and put on a sweater. Yizzle catch pnuemonia. I don’t what’s wrong with yizz…”

The other one chimed in: “Look at yizz, without a coat. Yizzle catch pnuemonia!’”

More laughing. And more. They laughed until they were exhausted.

And I never said, “Hi,” to the woman again.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Ed Lowe, Himself

How Am I Doing?

Here’s how I am (and by the way, I do appreciate the inquiry, so if was pure patronizing, please keep it a secret from me.).

I fell asleep January 5, 2008. I was in girl’s dorm room (first time—hey, class of ’67, we still wore ties and jackets) with my daughter, Colleen, who was to read from a work of her fiction, culminating a long and tough course of work, including creative writing, critical thinking and criticism.

Colleen turned 40 this Aug. 8.

I had just arrived, after 6 hours of driving from Long Island to someplace near Burlington, Vt., a ride that included some snow, near the end, which I did not know was not snow, but an early, ominous sign from one system of my body to another. I guess I didn’t get it. The idea of snow falling in Northern Vermont on January 5 was too subtle a hint for me, at least it was that night.
Doctors who much later let go some information that they shared only with Susan, my trusted Health Care Trustee, whom I designated only a month earlier, said that I had a bad case of pneumonia. But that was just a detail. As if I showed some poison ivy on my heel during the autopsy of third degree burns.

Colleen and her boyfriend, Chris, arrived, and we chatted while I finished a hamburger. I think we waited for a fourth member—a big, funny friend of theirs—before I then followed them to the campus.

I remember a stairs, a room, and a really welcoming bed.

I entered the room, met a few young writers, felt a little dizzy, asked if I could rest on the bed, and matter-of-factly said, “I think I’m having a stroke.”

That was it.

I’ve never before had a stroke, and don’t know what made me say that, but it worked out to be an accurate diagnosis. I didn’t pick up the pneumonia. Didn’t even hear it about until around May.

So, without knowing about the pneumonia, I lost consciousness until late March.

I never heard Colleen do the reading. She did it, I am told, in tears. One of my more cynical acquaintances asked if she thought it improved her grade. I think newspaper people, by and large, are not nice, and after 40 years, I keep only a few as friends.

A series of stories follow that incident, and I am learning them yet, and probably will until I re-visit whatever…places, if you can call them that...I then toured in Purgatory. The stories all are alternately embarrassing and, well, beautiful, depending on who you are and where you were at the time of both the doing and the accounting. But, that was not the question, and I already have tested your patience in trying to stick to that.

I next recall a scene as a sort of dream I had just before I regained consciousness—this is after two-and-three-quarter-months of slumber, so any part of this may be just my imagination, But I only recall six or seven dreams in my life, so that counts for something—and this voice, which may have been my own voice, asks, “Well, what do want to do?”

A voice that really sounds like mine says: “What, do get I a say in this?”

Long, I guess pregnant, pause.

“What do you want to do?” the disembodied voice persists.

This time, I took him—or, me—seriously. It was a him, though.

It got funny, in retrospect.

The first thing I said was, “Well, my car is paid for.”

I’m leaving the known world, and say proudly that I don’t owe money on the Honda.
I bought my CRV cash. Only time ever. I was angry with the Saturn dealer. All dealers, really, and I went to the savings account, and withdrew whatever amount, and got a bank check, and never went to a dealer again.

“…and the boat is paid for.”

Christ, Edgar (the boat) is almost 25.

Then, more seriously, “The kids will get, maybe $400,000 for the house, plus my retirement stuff. I should have taken care of Susan, dammit, but her four have grown. She’ll be sad, but she won’t have to put up with my shit, either, and she knows, now, that she’s terrific.

“But I couldn’t ask for another minute, God, I’ve had the best life. The best life.

“You can’t imagine,” I said to no one in particular. “I grew up on the Bay. We were poor, but I didn’t know it. We lived in a tiny room, a studio apartment over a garage on the Bay. I grew up to teach, then spent 40-years writing true stories. Beat that.

“You do whatever you do,” I said, “whoever you are. I couldn’t ask for another minute. It would be unconsciously ungrateful.”

I really was full of myself.

When I woke, if you call it that, I was in fetal position, and everything seemed worse the more I learned: can’t move; can’t speak; can’t get up; I can’t even my wipe my own ass? Really? A diaper? What else. Can’t read, can’t write, can’t talk. Can’t sing? Can’t SING!”
Hey, I said, “Go ahead, Take me.”’

“You said, ‘Whatever you want.’ I think I said.

“Oh, yeah. Shit. I said, Whatever you want. But, I meant…”

I’ve learned so much since then. No, begun to learn. But it’s kind of hard to hold onto, because it’s impossible, and couldn’t be. What hell, I’d also accepted death.

Yet, more than anyone, I knew it was real. And, I think, anyway, that I knew I had a lot to learn, too, and didn’t want to.

I was on an emotional roller coaster for months, but going from down to really down. I kept asking, “What’s the point? I made a lot of people happy. I hurt nobody…well, a couple of ex-wives didn’t like the beer, but they knew that from the get-go. And, well, that’s worth, what, a toothache, a violent cold.”

Maybe seven months ago, something crystallized that I’d been hovering over, but it slipped away as soon I got near. And about seven months ago, I caught hold of it, and can cling to it, most days.

It saves me, often—not today, unfortunately—but maybe the next two or three days.
Today, believe it or not, writing to you has saved me.

I decided, me, that this life after the stroke was in addition to the life before the stroke.
Simple, but it changes my life to two lives.

And the life before the stroke was spectacular, a life that millions would envy. And I had it, and I remembered it, and I even was smart enough to know that I had it when I had it, and said so, which made it even better, just when you think that it couldn’t be better.

So, this life, the life with a little extra challenge to it, is the bonus. A bonus.You lived a spectacular life, and the reward is a bonus.

So, that is how I am. Mainly.

As for appearing in person, I’ve done that twice already—once, in early May, at the theatre in Bay Shore, where I introduced the Jim Small Band; and once June 3 to an outfit called The Patricians, basically the Seniors of St. Patrick’s Church, to whom I did a comedy routine a few years ago.

I did all right. Got a few laughs. Not good enough to charge anything
for it, but good enough to keep at it.

I have to charge, in this life. There’s no newspapers any more.
BIOGRAPHY: ED LOWE (Amended for 2009)

Once, and proudly, a Lindenhurst, N.Y., Junior High school English teacher, Long Island’s raconteur/columnist Ed Lowe joined The Suffolk Sun as a daily newspaper reporter in August of 1969.

Two and a half months later, the Sun set.

Newsday, the reigning Long Island daily newspaper, hired Ed Lowe as a reporter.
By 1973 he had lived, somewhat unsuccessfully, as a rich bon vivant at the once-posh Irving Hotel in Southampton; grown a (unsuccessful) victory garden in his back yard, for the sake of 24 (very successful) weekly humor columns; been roughed up on the way to Romania by Czechoslovakian soldiers; lived with all kinds of, “Bayfolk,” for a prize-winning section about Great South Bay; and covered the Town of Babylon, the Suffolk Court System, the Court Martial of Jon Sweeney, and investigated plans to create a gas and oil distribution monopoly in Suffolk and Nassau Counties by the long-gone Northville Industries Company.

He also bought an old wooden boat, an old wooden house, and took lessons in sailing and Lamaze childbirth, all in the pages of Newsday.

He became a featured Newsday columnist in 1976, writing stories and essays three times a week, which won some prizes. In December of 2004, he accepted two offers, one for an early retirement incentive from Newsday, and the other to write once a week for the weekly Long Island Press, as well as The Neighbor Newspapers.

Meantime, Ed Lowe appeared for 14 seasons as a regular panelist on, “Father Tom and Friends,” a weekly cablevision show produced by Msgr. Tom Hartman, former director of Telecare, and, more notably, of , “God Squad,” fame; and from 1999 to 2002, Ed also hosted a daily radio talk show, “Lowecally Speaking with Ed Lowe,” on what then was WLUX 540AM.

In each of its three years on the air, Ed’s program won a FOLIO award from the Long Island Coalition for Fair Broadcasting, now the Fair Media Council.

A humorist-raconteur after the fashion of Mark Twain and Bill Cosby, Ed has performed at Long Island comedy clubs and has served as a Master of Ceremonies or delivered the keynote address for hundreds of charity gatherings and galas, National Honor Society inductions, high school and college commencements and conventions of professional societies, industrial associations and trade and union organizations.

He has keynoted superintendent staff conference days for 73 school districts, three BOCES supervisory districts, six statewide conventions of educators and education administrators and several national conventions of business and trade organizations.

Co-author with New York psychotherapist Stanley Siegel of, “The Patient Who Cured His Therapist,” and, “Uncharted Lives,” both published by Dutton/Plume, Ed Lowe has edited two published collections of his own work: “Ed Lowe’s Long Island,” and “Not As I Do -- A Father’s Report.”
A Marist College alumnus, father of four and grandfather of four, Ed Lowe used to live with his property taxes in Amityville, N.Y., on the South Shore of his beloved Long Island.

However—and, if you think this is long, imagine Ed Lowe’s surprise—on Jan. 5, 2008, in Vermont, while waiting for his second daughter, Colleen, then 39, to read from her work at a triumphant close of a grueling course in Creative Writing, Ed Lowe said, “I think I am having a stroke.”
He was right.

He slept for three months, in Vermont, which he has no memory of; he relaxed, after a fashion, for, well, more—in one of the many ironies of this life of irony, he cannot really be trusted for narrative accuracy regarding details of his brains having fallen out—and emerged, so far, ready to start again. He resumes writing for The Neighbor Newspapers September 09. 2009.
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Sunday, September 13, 2009

FarmhouseImage by ...-Wink-... via Flickr


This is Ed Lowe's blog.

He is new at it, but he won't be for long.

Reader of this, "blog," no doubt will make it part of their lives. Others have before, before blogging existed, when newspapers dominated people's daily reading habits.

Ed Lowe sneaked into one of them (Long Island's Newsday, at one time the 7th largest paper in the nation) and got away with writing non-newspaper stories without being caught at it for almost 40 years.


They were stories people told each other about they time they made a mistake identifying a neighbor as a desperado, or the time a black Labrador Retriever backed a truck into a Mercedes Benz, or the dock builder who used his hammer to gently tap a nut from a toilet seat and did $750 worth of damage, or the cop who got scammed out of $100 by a con-artist who showed up a week later in a different place with the same scam, and the same cop, watching.


Ed Lowe wrote them and people supplied them and Ed Lowe wrote them and people supplied them.


That is the beginning of the blog. Where it goes from there, nobody knows.